Sound Challenge: Can you hear which is louder?

Hello, my name is Matt. I record, edit, and mix music for a living. My profession requires an extremely discerning ear. This little listening test is to see if you can pick up subtle differences in volume.

What I have below is a series of 1khz sine waves, in sets of two. In each test I’d like you to try to discern which tone is the quieter of the two. The first test contains one tone that is 0.8 decibels quieter than the other. I believe this to be the quietest incremental difference of volume the average person can readily discern (evidence suggests 1 decibel to represent this volume difference, but I give the ear a bit more cred).

The following sets of sine waves contain even smaller differences in volume.

I just held a decibel meter up to my speakers (actually, I laid it on a platform to avoid the possible changing of hand position), and it reported the same volume on all the sample pairs. If there is a difference, then it must be only when the monitors are cranked to ear-splitting levels. I’m using a pair of Equator Audio D5 monitors which do dynamics very well. I think the test is screwed.

I’m actually surprised I got all three right without guessing any.
It wasn’t very hard to distinguish the loudness of each pair of waves, but I honestly thought my hearing was not all that sensitive by now. (Way too many years destroying my hearing while studying music, although the said studying must have trained my hearing…)

Got all of them right. I was actually concerned for a minute about one of them because the difference is subtle (i won’t spoil which one). Really nice test, but it’s passable if you have a decent hearing and a pair of quality headphones.

Manage to find this on a whim, All test manage to make excellent was not rocket science really just saying, Using a Beyerdynamic T1 as my headphones, its true indeed that audiophiles ear are quite sensitive lol